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Wednesday, March 18, 2015

In our rush to embrace, progress, technology and the conveniences of a modern civilization, we have sanitized away our connections with ritual and shamanic practice. We have forgotten how to make these critical connections not only with our own personal spiritual self, but with a larger cultural context that embraces, reflects and supports the symbiosis of spirit-self-culture. It is a kind of loss of a larger identity that we suffer from. We really don't know who or what we are, or how we "work".

"We had a lot of trouble with western mental health workers who came here immediately after the genocide and we had to ask some of them to leave.
They came and their practice did not involve being outside in the sun where you begin to feel better. There was no music or drumming to get your blood flowing again. There was no sense that everyone had taken the day off so that the entire community could come together to try to lift you up and bring you back to joy. There was no acknowledgement of the depression as something invasive and external that could actually be cast out again.
Instead they would take people one at a time into these dingy little rooms and have them sit around for an hour or so and talk about bad things that had happened to them. We had to ask them to leave."

~A Rwandan talking to a western writer, Andrew Solomon, about his experience with western mental health and depression.